The other day, I realized that I didn’t have any LinkedIn recommendations, and being in consulting work, I needed some social proof. So my first thought was to use the built-in recommendation form provided by LinkedIn:

But then I thought, how many people actually read emails that come in from LinkedIn. What were the chances that the request would go unseen, thus unanswered? So I thought there must be a way to just send someone a direct link to recommend me via email.

How to Get A Direct Link to be Recommended (Prior to 2017):

View Your Own LinkedIn Profile

Scroll to the Bottom where your Recommendation Area Is

Under, “Would you like to recommend?”, right click and get the URL of the link: “Recommend YOURNAME”.

The URL is structured something like this: www.linkedin.com/recs/give?memberId=00000000

Use that URL to construct an email to your desired recommended (make sure you’re connected to them on LinkedIn).

This is where the URL links to (once they sign in):

How to Get A Direct Link to be Recommended (2017):

Use the URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/YOURUSERNAME/recommendation/write/

It will take the user to a page that looks like this that prompts for relationship & position then asks for your recommendation:

Thanks, Ethan Anderson for letting me know about the update!

How To Ask For A LinkedIn Recommendation

I could write something up about that but there is a lot of great articles already about it, so here are two I recommend: